Durban – After the Klaarwater substation in the Mariann Industrial Park in Pinetown exploded on Tuesday night, causing a widespread power outage to about 50% of areas in Durban, some residents raised their concerns about the state of the city's infrastructure on eThekwini Municipality’s Facebook page, while others were impressed with the speed of repairs.
This comes after residents were forced to endure stage 6 load shedding implemented by Eskom last month for over a week before the levels were gradually reduced.
A few hours after the explosion, the city’s electricity unit managed to restore power to most of the areas affected while technicians worked on restoring power to Shallcross.
In an update on Wednesday morning just before 10am, the city said electricity technicians were on site doing repairs at the Shallcross substation, following the fault and explosion on the HV network.
“A relatively small number of customers in the Shallcross area are still off. We are doing everything possible to get all customers back on in that area today. An unrelated HV fault supply has just gone off in the Ridgeside area of uMhlanga. Staff are proceeding to the site now to investigate. Our resources are stretched to breaking point, so please bear with us if repairs take longer than customers are expecting,” said the municipality.
Commenting on one of the updates, a resident said: “Well done overall. The repairs were handled very rapidly for such a major outage.” Another said: “Great job. Let’s give credit where it’s due to the teams that worked to get it up and running again.”
One woman said this was the type of service that customers had signed up to receive after power in Clermont was restored in just a few hours.
“For the first time in my 43 years on this Earth living in eThekwini ... I need to commend your team on the rapid response and repair work done!!! Maybe there is some hope,” said another resident.
Yet another resident said he now had hope that services would continue to improve. “Thank you for restoring the lights so quickly. A job well done and so much appreciated.”
However, many residents also raised their concerns, with one resident saying he could not understand why the city had to wait for a disaster to occur before a decision was made to do maintenance work on infrastructure.
One woman said: “If the substations were maintained and updated, we would not have these problems.”
Another said there was still no power in Sithundu Hill in Mariannhill on Wednesday morning following the explosion. “Our fridge supplies are already spoiling due to excessive heat and our area isn’t even mentioned.”